Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires

by Fred Saberhagen

  Numbers, glowing softly from the corridor walls, guided Hagen and Ailanna to their rooms. "Hagen, what is this other sign that one sees on the walls?" It was a red hollow circle with a small piecut wedge of its interior filled with red also.

  "The amount of red inside shows the estimated fraction of a year remaining until the next veil falls."

  "Then there is not much of the year left, for sightseeing. Here, this must be our door. I would say we have come at a poor time." Opening the door, he did not reply. Their baggage had already been deposited inside.

  "I wouldn't want to be trapped here, Hagen. Well. the apartment's not bad . . . now what's the matter? What have I said?" She had learned to know at once when something really bothered him, which her inconsequential bickering rarely seemed to do.

  "Nothing. Ample warning is always given so the tourists can get away, you needn't worry.

  She was in the bedroom unpacking when something came in through the illusory window that seemed to give upon the golden plain. Where a sawtooth range of diminishing pyramids marched in from the horizon there came a shimmer and a sliding distortion that was in the room with her before she knew it, that passed on harmless through her own flesh, and went its way. She gave a yelp of fear.

  Hagen was in the doorway, smiling faintly. "Didn't I mention that we might be sharing our apartment here?"

  "Sharing—of course not. Oh. You mean with settlers, folk of other years. That's what it was, then. But—through the wall?"

  "That wall was evidently an open passage in their time. Ignore them, as they will us. Looking up through their veils they can see us—differently, too. While diving I have asked them to describe how we look to them, but their answers are hard to understand."

  "Tell me about diving," she said, when they had finished settling in and were coming out of doors again.

  "Better than that, I'll show you. But I'll tell you first, of course." As they walked out onto the plain, Hagen could hear the pulsar component of the triple system beating as sound, the sound coming now from overhead, thick and soft and at one third the speed of a calm human heart. It came through all the strangeness of space that lay between him and the invisible pulsar that locked its orbit intricately with those of a small black hole and of the world called Azlaroc.

  He said: "What is called diving, on Azlaroc, is a means of approaching the people and things that lie under the veils of the years. Nothing can pierce the veils, of course. But diving stretches them, lets one get near enough to the people of the past to see them more clearly and make photographs." And more than that, more than that, oh Gods of Space, thought Hagen but he said no more.

  On the plain other tourists were also walking, in this year's fashion of scanty garments each of a hundred colors. In the mild, calm air, under the vague yellowish sky that was not really a sky, and bathed in sunless light, Hagen had almost the feeling of being still indoors. He was heading for a divers' shop that he remembered. He meant to waste no time in beginning his private search in earnest.

  Ailanna walked beside him, no longer quarrelsome, and increasingly interested in the world around them. "You say nothing at all can pierce the veils, once they have fallen in and wrapped themselves about this planet?"

  "No matter can pierce them. And this is not a planet. I suppose 'star' is the best term for a layperson to use, though the scientists might wince at it. There's the divers' shop ahead, see that sign beside the cave?" The cave was in the side of a sharp-angled rhombic hill.

  Inside the shop they were greeted by the proprietor, a settler swathed in more than a hundred veils, who needed electronic amplifiers to converse with customers. After brief negotiation he began to take their measurements.

  "Ailanna, when we dive, what would you like to see?"

  Now she was cheerful. "Things of beauty. Also I would like to meet one of those first, stranded explorers."

  "The beauty will be all about. There are signals and machines to guide the tourist to exceptional sights, as for the explorer, we can try. When I was last here it was still possible to dive near enough to them to see their faces and converse. Maybe now, when a hundred and thirty more veils have been added, it is possible no longer."

  They were fitted with diving gear, each a carapace and helm of glass and metal that flowed like water over their upper bodies.

  "Hagen, if nothing can pierce the fallen veils of the years, how are these underground rooms dug out?"

  Now his diver's suit had firmed into place. Where Hagen's face had been she saw now only a distorting mirror, that gave an eerie semblance of her own face back to her. But his voice was familiar and reassuring. "Digging is possible because there are two kinds of matter, of physical reality, here coexisting. The stuff of the landscape, all those mathematical shapes and the plain they rise from, is comparatively common matter. Its atoms are docile and workable, at least here in this region of mild gravity and pressure. The explorers realized from the start that this mild region needed only air and water and food, to provide men with more habitable surface than a planet . . . there, your diver's gear is stabilized about you. Let's walk to Old Town, where we may find an explorer." Sometimes above ground and sometimes below, they walked, armored in the strange suits and connected to the year of their own visit by umbilical cables as fine and flexible and unbreakable as artists' lines on paper. Adjusting his gear for maximum admittance, Hagen nervously scanned the faces of all passing settlers. Now some features were discernible in even the oldest of them.

  "And the other kind of matter, Hagen, the other physical reality. What about the veils?"

  "Ah, yes. The material between the stars, gathered up as this triple system advances through space. What is not sucked into the black hole is sieved through nets of the pulsar's radiation, squeezed by the black hole's hundred billion gravities. shattered and transformed in all its particles as it falls toward Azlaroc through the belts of space that starships must avoid. Once every systemic year conditions are right and a veil falls. What falls is no longer matter that men can work with, any more than they can work in the heart of a black hole. Ailanna. are you tuned to maximum? Look just ahead."

  They were out on the surface again. A human figure that even with the help of diver's gear appeared no more than a wavery half-image had just separated itself from an equally insubstantial dwelling. A hundred and thirty years before, someone had pointed out a similar half-visible structure to Hagen as an explorer's house. He had never spoken to an explorer, but he was ready now to try. He began to run. The gear he wore was only a slight hindrance. Close ahead now was the horizon, with just beyond it the golden globe they had earlier observed. No telling how far away it was, a thousand meters or perhaps ten times that distance. Amid glowing dunes—here the color of the land was changing, from yellow to a pink so subtle that it was effectively a new color—Hagen thought that he had lost the explorer, but then suddenly the wavery stickfigure was in his path. Almost, he ran through or collided with it. He regained his balance and tried to speak casually.

  "Honorable person, we do not wish to be discourteous, and we will leave you if our inquiries are bothersome, but we would like to know if you are one of the original explorers."

  Eyes that one moment looked like skeletal sockets, and the next as large and human as Ailanna's own, regarded Hagen. Or were they eyes at all? Working with the controls of his sensory input he gained for one instant a glimpse of a face. human but doubtfully either male or female, squinting and intense, hair blown about it as if in a terrible wind. It faced Hagen and tried to speak, but whatever words came seemed to be blown away. A moment later the figure was gone, only walking somewhere nearby, but so out of focus that it might as well have flown behind the golden sphere somewhere.

  Question or answer, Hagen? Which had it offered you? Ailanna's hands clamped on his arm. "Hagen, I saw—it was terrible."

  "No, it wasn't. Only a man or a woman. What lies between us and them, that can be terrible sometimes."

  Ailanna was dialing
her admittance down, going out of focus in a different way. Hagen adjusted his controls to return fully with her to their own year. Very little of the land around them seemed to change as they did so. A chain of small pink hills, hyperbolic paraboloid saddles precisely separating members, seemed to grow up out of nothing in the middle distance. That was all.

  "Hagen, that was an explorer, that must have been. I wish he had talked to us, even though he frightened me. Are they still sane?" He looked around, out over the uninhabited region toward which they had been walking, then back toward the city. In the city was where he would have to search.

  He said: "The first veil that men ever saw falling here caught them totally by surprise. They described it as looking like a fine net settling toward them from an exploding sky. It settled over the first explorers and bound itself to the atoms of their bodies. They are all here yet, as you know. Soon it was realized that the trapped people were continuing to lead reasonable human lives, and that they were now protected against aging far better than we on the outside. There's nothing so terrible about life here. Why shouldn't they be sane? Many others have come here voluntarily to settle."

  "Nothing I have seen so far would lead me to do that." Her voice was growing petulant again.

  "Ailanna, maybe it will be better if we separate for a time. This world is as safe as any. Wander and surprise yourself."

  "And you, Hagen?"

  "I will wander too."

  He had been separated from Ailanna for a quarter of a day, and searching steadily all the time, before he finally found her.

  Mira.

  He came upon her in a place that he knew she frequented, or had frequented a hundred and thirty years before. It was one of the lower subterranean corridors, leading to a huge pool in which real water-diving, swimming, and other splashy sports were practiced. He was approaching her from the rear in the corridor when she suddenly stopped walking and turned her head, as if she knew he was there even before she saw him.

  "I knew you would be back, Hagen," she said as he came up.

  "Mira," he said, and then was silent for a time. The he said:

  "You are still as beautiful as ever."

  "Of course." They both smiled, knowing that here she could not age, and that change from any sort of accident was most unlikely. He said: "I knew that, but now I see it for myself." Even without his diving gear he could have seen enough through one hundred and thirty veils to reassure himself of that. But with his gear on it was almost as if he were really in her world. The two of them might hold hands, or kiss, or embrace in the old old way that men and women still used as in the time when the race was born of women's bodies. But at the same time it was impossible to forget that the silken and impermeable veils of a hundred and thirty years would always lie between them, and that never again in this world or any other would they touch.

  "I knew you would come back. But why did you stay away so long?"

  "A few years make but little difference in how close I can come to you."

  She put out her hands and held him by the upper arms, and stroked his arms. He could feel her touch as if through layers of the finest ancient silk. "But each year made a difference to me. I thought you had forgotten me. Remember the vows about eternity that we once made?"

  "I thought I might forget, but I did not. I found I couldn't."

  A hundred and thirty years ago he and Mira had quarreled, while visiting Azlaroc as tourists. Angry, Hagen had gone offstar without telling her; when an alarm sounded that the yearly veil was falling early, she had been sure that he was still somewhere on the surface, and had remained on it herself, searching for him, and of course not finding him. By the time he came back, meaning to patch up the quarrel, the veil had already fallen.

  She had not changed, and yet seeing her again was not the same, not all that he had expected it to be.

  The reaction to his coming back was growing in her. "Hagen, Hagen, it is you. Really you."

  He felt embarrassed. "Can you forgive me for what happened?"

  "Of course I can, darling. Come, walk with me. Tell me of yourself and what you've done."

  "I . . . later I will try to tell you." How could he relate in a moment or two the history of a hundred and thirty years? "What have you done here, Mira? How is it with you?"

  "How would it be?" She gestured in an old, remembered way, with a little sensuous, unconscious movement of her shoulder.

  "You lived here with me; you know how it is."

  "I lived here only a very little time."

  "But there are no physical changes worth mentioning. The air my yeargroup breathes and the food we eat are recycled forever, more ours than the rooms we live in are. But still we change and grow, though not in body. We explore the infinite possibilities of each other and of our world. There are only eleven hundred and six in my yeargroup, and we have as much room here as do the billions on a planet.

  "I feared that perhaps you had forgotten me."

  "Can I forget where I am, and how I came to be here?" Her eyes grew very wide and luminous—not enlarged eyes like Ailanna's, Mira like most other settlers had kept to the fashions of her year of veiling—and there was a compressed fierceness in her lips.

  "There was a time when I raged at you—but no longer. There is no point."

  He said: "You are going to have to teach me how to be a settler here. How to put up with gawking tourists, and with the physical restrictions on which rooms and passages I may enter, when more of them are dug out in the future. Do you never want to burrow into the rooms and halls of later years, and make them your own?"

  "That would just cause destruction and disruption, for the people of later years to try to mend. They could probably retaliate by diving against us, and somehow disarranging our lives. Though I suppose a war between us would be impossible."

  "Do I disarrange your life seriously, Mira, by diving to you now?"

  "Hagen!" She shook her head reprovingly. "Of course you do. How can you ask?" She looked at him more closely. "Is it really you who has come back, or someone else, with outlandish eyebrows?" Then the wild and daring look he knew and loved came over her, and suddenly the hundred and thirty years were gone.

  "Come to the pool and the beach, and we will soon see who you really are!"

  He ran laughing in pursuit of her. She led him to the vast underground grotto of blackness and fire, where she threw off her garments and plunged into the pool. He followed, lightly burdened with his diver's gear.

  It was an old running, diving, swimming game between them, and he had not forgotten how to play. With the gear on, Hagen of course did not need to come to the surface of the pool to breathe, nor was he bothered by the water's cold. But still she beat him, flashing and gliding and sliding away. He was both outmaneuvered and outsped.

  Laughing, she swam back to where he had collapsed in gasps and laughter on the black-and-golden beach. "Hagen, have you aged that much? Even wearing the drag and weight of diver's gear myself I could beat you today."

  Was he really that much older? Lungs and heart should not wear out so fast, nor had they, he believed. But something else in him had aged and changed. "You have practiced much more than I," he grumbled.

  "But you were always the better diver," she told him softly, swimming near, then coming out of the water. Some of the droplets that wet her emerging body were water of her own year, under the silken veils of time that gauzed her skin; other drops, the water of Hagen's time, clung on outside the veils. "And the stronger swimmer. You will soon be beating me again, if you come back."

  "I am back already, Mira. You are three times as beautiful as I remembered you."

  Mira came to him and he pulled her down on the beach to embrace her with great joy. Why, he thought, oh why did I ever leave?

  Why indeed?

  He became aware that Ailanna was swimming in the water nearby in her own diver's gear, watching, had perhaps been watching and listening for some time. He turned to speak to her, to offer some expla
nation and introduction, but she submerged and was gone. Mira gave no sign of having noticed the other woman's presence.

  "Do you miss the world outside. Mira?"

  "I suppose I drove you away to it, the last time, with my lamenting for it. But no, I do not really miss it now. This world is large enough, and grows no smaller for me, as your world out there grows smaller as you age, for all its galaxies and space. Is it only the fear of time and age and death that has brought you back to me, Hagen?"

  "No." He thought his answer was perfectly honest, and the contrast between this perfectly honest statement and some of his earlier ones showed up the earlier ones for what they were. Who had he been trying to fool? Who was it that men always tried to fool?

  "And was it," she asked, "my lamenting that drove you off? I lament no longer for my life."

  "Nor for the veil that fell between us?"

  The true answer was there in her grave eyes, if he could read it through the stretching, subtle, impenetrable veils.

  The red circles held narrow dagger-blades of urgent warning on all the walls, and warning voices boomed like thunder across the golden, convoluted plain. The evacuation ship lay like a thick pool of bright and melted-looking metal in the field, with its hundred doors open for quick access, and a hundred machines carrying tourists and their baggage aboard. The veil was falling early again this year. Stretching in a row across the gravity-inversion sky, near one side of the directionless horizon, explosions already raged like an advancing line of silent summer thunderstorms.

  Hagen, hurrying out onto the field, stopped a hurrying machine.

  "My companion, the woman Ailanna, is she aboard the ship?"